Archive for June, 2014

Sue Kerr continues her coverage on the situation with Allegheny County ceasing to offer domestic partnership benefits. Her recent post is an excellent read. I received some feedback via email from an occasional reader who has some history with the Pitt domestic partnership offerings that I appreciated receiving. I don’t know about the City of Pittsburgh or the Allegheny County offerings, but in the case of the University of Pittsburgh, the domestic partnership status was[Read More…]

On days like today, it is so depressing to be an advocate for change and progress. Why are we pushing for LGBTQ Rights when we are still so far behind when it comes to equality for women, the poor, and racial minorities. Is the success we see for marriage equality because marriage helps support the status quo of white male power, or is change really happening and today’s set back an example of the volatile[Read More…]

A petition at moveon.org because Allegheny County has announced that they will terminate all same-sex domestic partnerships by the end of July and any employee currently receiving benefits under a DP, will have to get married to maintain those benefits.

Tomorrow evening is the first of a series of community forums, sponsored by Mayor Peduto, one in each police zone, where the community is invited to share their ideas about what they feel is important in a new police chief. I wrote briefly about this last week, but want to again encourage everyone to participate. Unlike some cities which have a pronounced gayborhood, we have lesbian, gay, bi, trans*, and queer persons living everywhere within[Read More…]

In other words, under the guise of being opposed to 2% of the adult population marrying a same-sex partner, the AFAPA is actually pointing out how flawed heterosexual marriages are, and the possibility of adverse family events that result in them.

I have written some about the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) but tend to ignore them mostly. However, I was intrigued by their email claiming that this year’s March for Marriage had been a success. What was intriguing for me was the image used as the email header: It isn’t really news to anyone that NOM’s efforts have been religiously based from the beginning, yet, none of their literature or agenda has been so straightforward[Read More…]

To me, this says that some folks are really nervous about the future of Marriage Equality. While some of us are riding high on a wave on continuously positive judicial rulings, many on the national scene are sweating bullets about how we bring this to completion.

Let’s support trans persons who set boundaries around what they will and won’t discuss. Let’s couple our inquisitiveness about their bodies with an inquisitiveness about the whole of the persons. But let’s do it without blaming ourselves.

We must stop viewing LGBTQ as if it is only some set of rights or issues, and start seeing gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and queer people as full participants in all aspects of the changes that are making Pennsylvania a leader once again.